


to widow me is to slay me

by remembertowrite



Category: The Black Tapes Podcast
Genre: Alternate Universe - Soulmates, F/M, Fate & Destiny, Free Will, Soulmate-Identifying Marks, Strand-centric, Trope Subversion/Inversion
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2016-08-12
Updated: 2016-08-12
Packaged: 2018-08-08 06:57:42
Rating: General Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 1,367
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/7747645
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/remembertowrite/pseuds/remembertowrite
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>Richard Strand is not a believer.</p><p>Or: the soul mate AU where Alex and Strand aren't soul mates.</p>
            </blockquote>





	to widow me is to slay me

**Author's Note:**

  * For [petit_moineau](https://archiveofourown.org/users/petit_moineau/gifts).



> For petit_moineau, for helping me brainstorm on the most common soul mate AUs. This is the fic I was talking about the other night on Tumblr. :)

Richard Strand is a not a believer.

Man is atoms assembled at random. A zygote, at first, that emerges kicking and screaming from the warm fortress of its mother’s womb, an unwilling exile from the most on-the-nose incarnation of Plato’s Cave. Then, a consumptive, pointless organism living for a blip of time in the 14 billion years of existence. And finally, a cadaver with hands turned cold, fading into the eternity of death, into the smell of rotting earth and the foodstuff of worms, or disintegrating into white ash like snow, until the atoms that had come together in the beginning part ways like a great love lost.

Richard isn’t popular at parties.

He’s not popular in science circles, either. How many papers has he read that explain consciousness as a chemical reaction, the latest in a series of cause and effect stretching back to the Big Bang? The same molecules react the same way, every time: H2 plus O2 yields H2O, over and over and over like the planet’s pulse. How many times has he heard Church leaders, those fanatical biochemistry PhDs, preaching this as proof of predestination, of a god? Aren’t the names naturally inscribed on the inside of every human’s left wrist proof enough, they argue?

Richard is not a scientist. He never wants to be ordained as one.

He’s, at heart, a philosophical man, the president and founder of the Strand Think Tank, devoted to logical thinking. A kind of countercultural rebellion, in his own small way.

His darkest secret is that he once was a believer, as a child, as a young man. He had run his fingers over the cursive signature looping across his wrist that promised joy in every incline upward and beauty in the curling of the downward slant. _Your true love, Richie_ , Cheryl had murmured to him in his adolescence.

The thing about soul mates, though, is you only get one.

 _To widow me is to slay me, darling_ , Dickinson had written a century before. Richard had considered the line—a favorite at weddings and funerals—as a metaphor, until the literalism of the poetry slapped him across the face at 32.

She refused to leave him, her sweet name running across the small expanse of his skin like a ghost’s ethereal touch.

And so, Richard Strand is not a believer.

He forces himself not to believe.

###

“You’re saying, objectively, that ghosts don’t exist?”

“Yes.”

“But what about the”—Alex shuffles through her notebook, looking for a specific reference— “the 2012 discovery of a new particle of matter that Bishop Higgs said possibly confirms the existence of a magnetic plane that ghosts can manipulate?”

Richard chuckles bitterly despite himself. It’s been two weeks, and this journalist is still convinced she’s got a story in him. She hasn’t written him off as a crackpot heretic quite yet.

“That’s pure speculation, a poor case of deducing something grand from a statistically insignificant sample of experiment results. Besides, Dr. Higgs has always been prone to zealotry, considering his lifelong ties to the Church. Suggesting the existence of ghosts furthers the Church’s agenda of selling some sort of ‘afterlife,’ of a ‘great plan’—”

“Isn’t there, though? I mean, how can you counter the existence of the Mark?”

Richard catches himself adjusting the buttons on his left cuff. The curse of a nonbeliever is long sleeves.

The click of an audio recorder switching off draws his attention upward.

“Richard” —he winces at how casually she strips him down with his given name—“do you have..?”

She trails off, rubbing her wrist. _Michael_ , he’s seen scrawled there. He imagines the edges of the letters black and charred like a brand.

No wedding band, though. She’s still officially in waiting. (And he’s forever assigned to mourning, but he finds it a pointless state of being. He abandoned his own ring long ago.)

“I think that’s enough for today, Alex,” he responds, and he leaves the journalist behind. He tries his best to stand alone on the shore the wide world, but love can never sink to nothingness for an emotional wreck of a man like him.

###

Six weeks, and the feeling won’t fade.

Ten weeks, and it consumes him every evening.

Five months, and the Mark on his wrist burns like sin.

Alex always comes back to hear his counterargument against each new scholarly documentation of ghosts or demons. Thanks to the exposure from the podcast, other members of the press inundate Ruby with requests for comment when _Nature_ , the Church’s lead scientific journal, publishes a new paper. He’s been dubbed a filthy skeptic, a heretic.

And yet she always comes back. He’s come to admire her open-mindedness.

It’s just as he’s warming up to the idea of revealing his unnatural feelings when he loses her.

Here’s how it happens:

It’s a late evening after a long day interviewing local experts about the New Mexico cave paintings, and Alex is reclining on his hotel bed, reading off her notes to him as he sits stiffly in a desk chair. She’s not an uncommon presence in his private spaces, but having a woman—another person, even—sharing such a space is an uncomfortable echo of times past.

Still, she disarms him with her curiosity and her charm. He embraces the intimacy.

He rolls up his sleeves before he realizes what he’s done.

Alex’s eyes fixate on his Mark on his wrist like a civilian stares up at planes dropping bombs. She launches herself off the bed and wrenches his hand off the desk chair armrest.

“You have the Mark,” she whispers. She refuses to look at him.

“Yes,” he admits, shame burning hot in his gut. “She died.”

Her voice cracks like a broken music box hitting the wrong note.

“It’s—it’s not _my_ name.”

He wants to pin Alex down and interrogate her about _what the hell_ she means by that, but she’s already out the door and down the stairs and probably fleeing to her car.

Richard flings his neck back, hands over his head, and he hears the _tsk_ of disapproval from the phantom of his wife.

He doesn’t believe. He doesn’t believe. He doesn’t believe.

###

Alex doesn’t return his calls.

Or emails.

Or letters.

 _Getting involved with a believer can only lead to a sad ending_ , Ruby tells him, and speaks no more on the matter.

That truth does nothing to temper the feelings. They’re just as intense as the first time around.

Richard professes to be a follower of logic and rationality, but his tragic flaw is his emotionality. If he’s honest with himself, he originally set up the Strand Think Tank more to process the loss of his wife than to combat the Church’s ludicrous claims. (Which are still ludicrous, nevertheless.)

“I’m going to Seattle,” he announces to Ruby one day, out of the blue.

She books him a flight ticket and hugs him hard before he leaves.

“Please be okay, boss,” she breathes into his ear, and he wants to laugh and sob. She’s the last of his family.

“Please be rational, Ruby,” he teases.

One of them has to be, and he’s certainly not up to the task.

###

Claiming to be a relative of Alex Reagan to get past the PNWS receptionist isn’t the worst thing he’s done. He’s a natural liar.

Perhaps even a self-deceiver, if he thinks about it too much.

He cracks the door of Alex’s office and finds himself staring into the face of his destruction, the soft glimmer of hesitant eyes, the shadows of not so subtle frown lines.

“Richard,” she croaks out, defrosting from weeks of silence.

He’s quiet as he draws nearer to her. She mirrors his movements, meeting him halfway.

“Why are you here?” Alex asks.

He rolls up his cuffs, wearing his heart on his sleeve. He offers her his left forearm, and to his relief, she accepts it.

“I don’t believe in soul mates,” he declares.

Her half-smile is a self-fulfilling prophecy.

“I don’t know what to believe anymore,” she says bitterly.

He drags her into a kiss, and she claws at his left wrist until it bleeds like a broken hourglass spilling sand.


End file.
